Many people reading this article may ask themselves “why join the SWP in the first place?” Others still will ask “why go on to join the AWL?” These are legitimate questions. In fact, the answer to the question “why I left the SWP” revolves almost entirely around answering the other two.

“The LRC meets at a time when socialists within the Labour Party, trade unions, left groups and many progressive campaigns are being forced to face up to a number of hard truths in reassessing their future”, read the National Committee statement to the Labour Representation conference on 17 November

Around 250 attended the conference, slightly down on last year. The theme of the conference was Next Steps for the Left.

Marx’s aim of transforming society into a “free association of producers” has long been ignored by large swathes of the “Marxist” left. Not only Stalinists and social democrats, but also avowedly Trotskyist organisations such as the Militant Tendency (forerunner of the Socialist Party) have equated nationalisation with socialism, with the state bureaucracy substituted for the working class as the vanguard of social transformation.

Parts of the left back any opposition to US imperialism around the world dogmatically, without qualification, and with little attempt to examine what the effects and actions of the imperialist power are. Or what the political character of the local alternatives to imperialism are. These leftists might be suprised by the story of the US imperialist intervention in Japan, contradicting as it does, some preconceived notions of how an imperialist power behaves.

I don’t think there is a point in ‘taking sides’ in this faction fight. The SWP are reaping the whirlwind that they have sown. It appears to be a rearguard action against the opportunist, anti-secular and tailist politics that they encouraged in Respect. Finally they have heard the sound of Cliff turning in his grave!! But they deal with it in just the same bureaucratic anti-democratic way that they used yesterday against those of us who raised these very questions.

On 16 October the NUS National Executive Committee voted with only two votes (myself and SWP member Rob Owen) against to endorse the proposals of the “Governance Review” for slashing internal democracy, and, with only four votes against, to call on member unions to authorise an Extraordinary National Conference to rush through the changes.

Daniel Randall’s article in Solidarity 3/119 was extremely useful for the information it collected on working-class movements and groups in Israel and Palestine.

It seemed to me, though, that it lacked a dimension. The working-class movements among the Palestinians and the Israelis represent our fundamental hopes, and they deserve support as workers’ movements whatever their exact policies.

But the working-class movements can effect fundamental political change only when they have the policies to do so.

Energetic US diplomacy may have headed off – for the time being – the threat of a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.

Turkey wants to see the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerilla bases in northern Iraq closed down. The PKK, a Stalinist-nationalist organisation based in the Kurdish areas of Turkey – and now with bases in Iraq – launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state in 1984.